Saturday, July 18, 2009

Stuff -- link updated

The theatrical trailer for Formosa Betrayed, the movie loosely based on the murder of writer Henry Liu and the book Fires of the Dragon, is now out on Youtube. Enjoy!

The government of Taiwan does a really great job getting things online and taking advantage of e-document systems to let people carry out tasks, and inform them of what services are available. But often nobody seems to know this. The Taiwan Institute for Economic Research (TIER) has an e-newsletter and website called Taiwan What's Up that is aimed at foreigners and contains information on services and similar. TIER would very much like foreigners to sign up for the email notification list. You can email them at taiwanwhatsup@tier.org.tw.

UPDATE: The TIER link is now updated and works perfectly.

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5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I have a huge amount of respect for Kung Mingshin (龔明鑫), who I believe is now the vice chair/president of TIER.

He predicted the depreciation of the S. Korean won, and made explicit the huge trade imbalances between East Asia and the US, i.e. the US borrows and spends + East Asia saves and sells were unsustainable back in 2007, when the economy was in high gear and way before the financial crisis in 2008. During the presidential campaign, he had very realistic, rational assessments of Ma's economic plans.

I don't know what TIER's plans are, but if it includes getting weekly economic notes from Dr. Kung, it is very much worth listening too.

Do you understand Chinese? Pretty much everything I heard him say was through his appearance on a weekly RTI radio program and through his infrequent appearances on TV programs (FTV had a Sunday program that once in awhile would have him on). You can try to request back programs from RTI, the program he commonly appeared on was 台灣政經廣場. If you write to the host, and mention Dr. Kung's name and what you are looking for, she may be able to help you out. They should have digital archives of recordings because the latest couple of months of recordings are made available online. Just ask her for the shows comparing Frank Hsieh and Ma Ying-jeou's economic policies. Also the shows on Taiwan's industrial policy.

Unfortunately, like many things in Taiwan, since Ma's election, things have changed. The show has gotten very Blue, and they have gotten rid of guest hosts that appear partly Green. They got rid of the other co-host Shu Yongming, a professor known for his association with the DPP and with having participated in the Baihe student movement in the early 90s.

The remaining host is made so myopic by her Blueness that I don't even think she realizes how big the predictions that Dr. Kung made were. I no longer listen to the show, as it is no longer a useful source of information.

But still, her email hcl@rti.org.tw . Can't hurt to give it a try. At the very least, you may be able to get Dr. Kung's contact information from her.

That TIER website is so laughably amateurish. Both the English and Chinese summaries end up linking to the same PDF. PDF?! If you read the Chinese and then clicked, you would be confused by all the English. No RSS feed either. They would've done better just setting up a blog...

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